Grave Yard, Murgasty, Co. Tipperary

Co. Tipperary |

Burial Grounds

Grave Yard, Murgasty, Co. Tipperary

A graveyard that has, in effect, swallowed its own history.

The site at Murgasty, just north of John Street in the centre of Tipperary town, is recorded as the location of a medieval church, yet nothing of that structure now breaks the surface. No stonework, no carved fragments, no graveslabs predating 1700 survive in any visible form. What stands instead is a Church of Ireland building erected in 1832, occupying ground that may once have sat within the north-western angle of the town's defensive circuit.

The medieval church whose record lingers here was almost certainly a pre-Reformation foundation, one of several that would have served a town of Tipperary's standing during the later medieval period. The defensive reference is significant: Irish medieval towns were frequently laid out with churches positioned at or near the corners and gates of their enclosing walls or ditches, serving both spiritual and practical functions within the urban plan. That this site may have occupied such a corner position suggests it was no peripheral chapel but a structurally embedded part of the town's original organisation. The 1832 Church of Ireland building that replaced whatever came before it arrived during a period of considerable ecclesiastical reconstruction across Ireland, when older and often ruinous Protestant parish churches were being rebuilt in a more confident Gothic Revival idiom. The earlier fabric, if any remained by then, did not survive the process.

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